It almost a perfect mixer, inspired from a hugely successful Portastudio, but in 24 tracks digital.
It sounds clean and good enough. It is not going to blow you away with sound quality, but the convenience of having mixer, audio interface, and multitrack recorder all built together in one unit, wins.
A few things they could have improved, maybe even for MK2.
1. Routing possibility is very limited. You basically need DAW to do any kind of routing.
2. Build quality is pretty low. Maybe even one of the lowest I've seen from any mixer. (You would think Mackie is cheap enough...) Everything on the board feels solid but they just feel cheap. I wish I can replace all the knobs and faders, and I might.
3. There is no way to "bypass" EQ and Compressor. You can zero them, but still Compressor will stay active no matter what and I don't like that.
4. Limits at 48K sample rate. No Word Clock I/O.
5. No headphone cue, so not really suitable for certain Live applications. (unless you use another sub mixer)
6. Most importantly, recordings are done pre EQ and pre Compressor. No way to record post in MTR.
7. No MIDI clock support. (could be improved with Firmware)
8. Low and High range EQ are fixed and not sweepable.
But I still give 5 solid stars since it does work very well. And there is nothing in the market like Model series, at least in May of 2021.
If you have a few hardware instruments and use DAW together, this unit will improve your workflow for production.
